Damon Knight - Orbit 18

“I got the picture,” said Peter Renoir. “We take out Gunga Din and substitute Nanette Fabray. Don’t tell me I ain’t got the picture!”

“Who we gonna get to direct it?”

“How about we get Gower Champion? I want someone who isn’t going to mess it up by knowing anything.”

“You’re a genius, Peter Renoir,” said Semina.

“Yes, I know,” said Peter Renoir.

Semina tells a lie and then tells the truth. There is no change in her face. She murders a stripper named Shirley who wants to get married and have a baby. She murders a stripper who is not named Shirley and who doesn’t want to get married and would sell a baby if she could get anything out of it. There is no change in her face.

She goes away for the weekend with a bowling team sponsored by a local carwash. The inbuilt demand for a higher standard of living creates a feeling of menace. The captain of the bowling team dies from heart failure that may or may not have been caused by the bullet in his brain. Panic-stricken by this turn of events, she decides to escape from this world. She buys a ticket and enters a movie house to watch a double feature. The film ends and we are left with a sense of familiarity.

Peter Renoir is an alien. He feels naked without his clothes. He equates morality with being uncomfortable. If only he were illiterate. We could save him if he were illiterate. The ways of official literacy do not equip people to know themselves, the past or the present.

Why doesn’t Peter Renoir understand as we understand? Why doesn’t he know the world has been conquered? Don’t you understand? The world has been conquered. What have they done to the earth and the people?

Who are they? I can explain me. I am a creature of the nightland. I am of the soil. I am people. That is who I am.

Who are they? They are technology. They are the aliens. Technology is the creature of the conquered world. The world, all my peoples, is the materials of technology, not its form.

The car did not do the work of the horse. It replaced it. Technology will not do the work of the people. It will replace them.

Semina is arrested for flaunting antisexual implications. Peter Renoir bails her out. They fall in love. They build it up to a severe emotional disturbance. However, as they realize that they are at last approaching a permanence and security unknown to them and their generation, Peter Renoir finds himself pursuing anticliché to anticlimax.

Semina catches him kissing himself. He defends himself by casually remarking, “When sex dies it is climax.”

She snubs him in the closing scene by proclaiming, “Others may call you sensibly adaptive but I think you are a faggot.”

The movie ends and we are left without a sense.

“Semina,” said Peter Renoir, moving toward her in a zoom, up angle. “Why don’t we do it?”

“You mean, uh, oh dearest!” said Semina. “You’ve finally discovered the secret! After millions of miles and one of your smiles, you’ve finally found out how to do it. I’m so proud of you!”

“Aw, shucks,” said Peter Renoir, blushing. “It wasn’t nothing special. I just watched television until I found out how they did it.”

“Nevertheless,” said Semina, “I’m impressed. How do we do it?”

“Well,” said Peter Renoir, blushing through every pore. “I believe the best way is for you to prop yourself up on that couch over there. Kind of slouch around and blink your eyes a lot. Then light up a cigarette.”

“Then what?” pole-vaulted Semina, arching enthusiastically over his every word.

“Then,” said Peter Renoir, with dramatic emphasis and a slight snigger, “I leap on top of you, your hand will become limp and the cigarette will drop to the floor. Later you will cry.”

“Why don’t we just forget the whole thing?” said Semina.

I am an sf fanzine editor. I am forty-nine years old and never have been kissed. I am a peeping tom, a chronic masturbator. The mirror is my staff of life, my totem, my life’s work. The window is my prey. What is my threat? What is my power?

My secret is that I am lonely and in that silence that surrounds me, I am able to pierce the windows with my mouth and make an unknowing partner of anyone in my eyes’ range. I am deeply involved in a current fan project to cure blindness with a whore’s spittle. My threat and my power is in my ability to motivate, to “show the donkey the carrot.”

MUTATIONS ARE ONLY POSSIBLE THE MOMENT ONE GOES FROM ONE SET OF CONVENTIONS TO ANOTHER.

The science-fiction editor, in order to play his game with a full deck, is forced to accept only images that represent an orderly sequence. An image path that is familiar. That is why science fiction sometimes repeats itself itself itself itself itself itself itself and why this story will get thirty-five rejection slips. An Indian tells the story of his life from the day the world began. He will never tell his life’s story with any regard to chronology. He may work back or work forward or both. He will repeat himself many times and omit things frequently. Shall I apologize for this pagan mysticism, the willful obscurity about my craft? I want to withhold my skills from profane onlookers. I am, after all, repeating the works of nature.

Peter Renoir and Semina are hopelessly in love and they decide to kill each other. While on a visit to Renoir’s mother they decide to kill Mommy instead. Before they can carry it out, however, a semi-pro football team, turned cannibal after losing their league franchise, attacks the house. Peter Renoir is killed, as is his mother. Semina helps them eat the evidence of their intellectual dilemma, nearly choking on Renoir’s mother, who is tough and stringy. She joins the team as an outside linebacker. She is later benched and then raped by a referee. The film ends in a closeup on the fifty-yard line and we are left with a sense of loss.

From Reviews in Film:

Only a director of the stature of Peter Renoir could bring himself so consistently to face contemporary reality. The determination to show only what is real is clearly an aspect of Renoir’s wider determination to expose himself completely to the age in which we live. The scene in which an apple is stuffed up Peter Renoir’s anus in preparation for being butchered, cooked and eaten is an obvious attempt to tell us that what we are watching is more than a film but instead the very framework of everyday reality. At the end of the film, when the director allows us to actually see one of the corpses breathing, we are once again assured in the director’s unshakable faith in the unconquerorable human spirit.

Peter Renoir is leaving his rich wife because he is too comfortable. Semina is leaving Richmond, Indiana, because she is tired of sleeping with truck drivers. They meet and fall in love beside a tennis-ball factory. Semina is kidnapped on the first night they spend together by one of her old truck-driver friends. Peter Renoir pursues her the length and breadth of highway 101. He finds the semi-truck in which she was a prisoner. The truck is empty with the exception of the corpse of a midget named Russell.

He finally catches up with them in the men’s room of a truck stop in New Jersey. He realizes that he has lost her because the truck driver is built better. Peter climbs to the top of a ten-story building and dives off. Nine floors later he repents of his rash action but alas, too late. The movie ends and we are left with a sense of having seen it.

HOW YOU, THE READER, CAN APPRECIATE THIS STORY.

Begin like this. You the reader, somewhat awkward at first, begin reading this story with as much intelligence and sensibility as you can bring to it. In the passages where the theme (animal suffering) is most acute, you will be at least able to note the technique and methodology by which parts of the effect were achieved. But when the theme weakens, you will find yourself with a surplus of attention which you can profitably direct toward some other activity.